Can paid media behind a creator video actually recruit engineers?

Overview

Gamma is an AI-native platform for creating presentations, documents, and websites, and it is hiring engineers into a competitive San Francisco talent market. The idea, which came from Gamma's marketing side, was deliberately unconventional: rather than post another job listing, put paid media behind a creator video — a 1:26 film starring creator and comedian Austin Nasso playing a Gamma engineer — and see whether paid spend could actually drive qualified engineering candidates to careers.gamma.app.

Winston Francois was brought in to run the experiment end to end. The mandate:

• Test whether paid media behind creator content could recruit engineers, not just generate awareness
• Drive qualified candidate traffic to Gamma's careers page across Meta and LinkedIn
• Move fast, read the signal honestly, and come back with a clear point of view on what to do next

The challenge

• An unproven premise: using performance paid media as a recruiting channel — behind a single creator video — was a first-of-its-kind experiment with no playbook to copy.
• A hard-to-measure outcome: the real result — a qualified engineering hire — lives in Gamma's Ashby applicant system, several steps downstream of any ad click.
• Attribution gaps: Meta's conversion tracking was unreliable during the window and recorded no clean conversion events, so ad-platform data alone could not tell the full recruiting story.
• Two channels, two jobs: Meta had to carry efficient reach and volume while LinkedIn served as professional proof and self-qualification — each judged on its own terms.

The approach

1. Built the campaign around one authentic creator asset

• Anchored everything to the Austin Nasso hero video — the creator playing a Gamma engineer, riffing on the day-to-day of the job — and cut it into micro-hooks, explainer clips, and CTA snippets.
• Ran a test phase (July 27 – Aug 2) to validate tracking and delivery, then took the Austin Nasso creative live Aug 3 and scaled through Aug 31.
• Drove all traffic to careers.gamma.app, with downstream attribution handled via Ashby UTM parameters rather than native ad-platform lead tracking.

2. Ran Meta for efficient, high-intent volume

• Structured a Landing-Page-View campaign (Eng_SF_Broad_LPV) and optimized against cost-per-landing-page-view with a <$0.50 flag threshold.
• Tested seven creative concepts cut from the hero film — from the full-length “Elevator” edit to 6–19s hooks like “Dropdown Menu” and “Are You Guys Hiring?”
• Protected budget behind the winners and flagged underperformers (the “Skiing & Pretzels” lifestyle cut) for pause against the test-phase kill threshold.

3. Used LinkedIn for professional proof and self-qualification

• Ran a parallel Website-Visits campaign (WF [Traffic] – Eng Recruiting) targeting SF software engineers.
• Weighted spend toward the cross-channel winners — “Are You Guys Hiring?” and “Big Tech vs Gamma” — and retired the higher-cost test baseline once tracking was validated.
• Read LinkedIn as a qualification channel, accepting a higher cost per click in exchange for a professionally self-selected audience.

4. Reported straight and recommended forward

• Delivered a combined channel report with clear benchmarks (30% hook rate, 1.5% CTR, <$0.50 cost-per-result) and called performance against them honestly.
• Named exactly what worked, what to scale, and what to kill — including the finding that long-form narrative outperformed short cutdowns for this audience.
• Flagged the Meta measurement gaps openly and recommended fixing tracking before the next phase rather than overstating attributed results.

The results

Meta was the clear performance driver: the live Austin Nasso ad set delivered landing-page views at $0.41 each, and the full-length “Elevator” hero film alone drove 41K+ landing-page views at a 45% hook rate and a 4.80% CTR — well above the 30% hook-rate and 1.5% CTR benchmarks set for the campaign. LinkedIn played its intended role as a professional-proof channel, contributing reach and clicks at a higher cost per action.

The outcome that mattered most sat downstream of the dashboards: the experiment set out to prove whether paid spend behind a creator video could surface qualified engineering candidates, and it did — producing a qualified applicant and meeting the goal Gamma set — even as the team flagged the Meta attribution gaps rather than papering over them. Most of what the campaign returned was a clear, honest read on how to pair creator content with paid media next time.

The winning creative

One 86-second film starring creator Austin Nasso — playing a Gamma engineer — anchored the entire campaign, and was the single best-performing asset across both channels. It was then cut into shorter concepts to test hooks and scale reach.

Top performer overall

“Elevator” — the full-length hero film

The long-form cut absorbed 71% of Meta's Austin Nasso spend and returned proportionally more. Long-form, character-driven creator storytelling outperformed every short cutdown — challenging the usual “short-form wins” assumption for this audience.

41K+Landing-page views

45.1%Hook rate (30% benchmark)

4.80%CTR (1.5% benchmark)

$0.41Cost per result

The cutdowns that scaled it

What we learned

• Narrative depth beat snackable hooks: across Meta, hook rate and CTR rose almost linearly with length up to ~90 seconds, and the full-length creator-led story outperformed every short cutdown.
• Fix measurement before you scale: the real recruiting outcome lives in the applicant system, so downstream attribution has to be wired cleanly before the next phase, not after.
• Creator content and paid media are complementary, not interchangeable: the same “hiring” hook that won on Meta also translated to LinkedIn, but each channel earns its keep on a different metric.
• Being straight about what didn't work is the deliverable: naming the attribution gaps and the concepts to kill is what makes an experiment worth running — and worth running again.